The Jury (29 page)

“What about those rabbits?” he said.

No answer.

“I'm worried about those rabbits, Betty.” “Are you?” asked Betty politely.

“They'll be awfully hungry, poor things, with no one to feed them.”

Aunt Ann intervened. “Oh, they'll be all right, Charlie.” Confound the woman's cheerfulness, he thought. “It's turned out very fortunately, as it happens,” said Aunt Ann.

“Indeed?” Charles could not follow his sister-in-law's gymnastics.

“Yes. Very fortunately. Mrs Fairfax rang up just now to say she wasn't sure whether she'd got room for Betty after all.”

“No room, eh?” said Charles, with belated intelligence. “The rabbits must go hungry then: that's all.”

Betty glanced from face to face. “I want to go to Mrs Fairfax's
tonight”
she said firmly.

“And stay?” asked Aunt Ann. “And look after the rabbits for her?”

“Yes,” said Betty.

“There now!” exclaimed Aunt Ann. “What a pity Mrs
Fairfax hasn't room for you!” But she was cheerful even in face of that disaster. “Perhaps if we ask her again …”

Charles convulsively swallowed his mouthful of buttered toast and rose from the table. “That's right, Ann. You speak to her on the telephone, while Betty and I get the car out.” He left his second cup of tea untasted.

Sitting in his commanding corner of the jury-box, Charles recalled that drive to Mrs Fairfax's house, with Betty on the seat beside him dancing up and down and singing in her excitement. How long would that mood last? A most unwonted mood, for Betty was in general a silent child. Working hard, he kept up a flow of genial conversation, hoping against hope that the child could be handed over, the parting effected, before her ecstasy subsided. In every dull moment of the trial his thoughts returned to that drive—gratefully, wistfully. And dull moments were not lacking. At first a sense of the importance of the occasion kept his attention alert, but three days of it wore his patience rather thin and he was conscious of missing things. Was that what the judge meant by looking so intently at him?

And now he and his oddly assorted companions were to consider their verdict. The black-gowned usher, who had administered that resounding oath, was now doing a bit of swearing on his own account, to the effect that he would see the jury safely bestowed in the jury-room, and that he would neither speak with them nor allow others to do so. So, in single file, they passed out of the jury-box, down a corridor, and into a bare room containing twelve chairs ranged round a table. The door was locked behind them.

“It almost looks as though we were expected,” remarked one of the company, a long-faced, square-jawed man. There was a blueness about his chin. His black hair was plastered down close on his head. His nose was long and large and straight, a nose of character. His blue serge suit was indifferently cut. Not quite a gentleman, Charles decided, and flashed at the fellow a deprecating glance, for he suspected an attempt at jocularity which, to say the least, was ill-timed. But there was nothing in Bonaker's face to confirm the suspicion, no mischief in the dark eyes, no hint of a smile. Massive and matter-of-fact, he sat himself down.

His voice and his action disturbed the religious silence, dissipated the slight awkwardness created among them by the sound of that key turning in the lock. They took their places at the conference-table.

“May I?” asked Major Forth gallantly, with his hand on the back of the chair next to Clare Cranshaw's. A superfluous inquiry, for the lady had already been his guest at luncheon and had heard a good half of his life-story. But it was the Major's way to err on the side of ceremony, and it was Clare's way to like him the better for it. She seemed to him a nice sensible little woman, and, what was more, a lady. They saw eye to eye in this matter of the murder.

Clare answered him with nothing but a smile, but when he had sat down she said, with a quietness almost confidential: “Why don't you smoke?”

“You permit?” he asked. He produced a cigarette-case, with a glance of disapproval at the plump person opposite who was filling a briar-pipe. “Perhaps you …?” he suggested.

“No, thank you,” said Clare Cranshaw. It cost her something, a little, to say that. But she judged that the Major, though not quite old-world enough to be censorious of a woman's smoking, would think it more suitable for her, more feminine, to refrain in this mixed and semi-public gathering. And, while she had by no means made up her mind what to do with him, she was conscious of desiring his good opinion.

“Ah, no,” said the Major. And the satisfaction in his tone rewarded her, told her that she had done the right thing. In a company anything but select she was behaving like the lady she unquestionably was. It might almost be said that she was keeping the flag flying. The white man's burden rested, for a moment, upon her elegant womanly shoulders.

“But I won't pretend I never do,” she added daringly. “Do you disapprove, Major?”

Mr Bayfield, filling his pipe, had noticed the Major's scowl and ignored it with defiant ostentation. If this military-looking gentleman, or any other gentleman, had dropped into the shop to buy an evening paper or a ball of string, he would have been received with a civility little short of obsequious by Mr Bayfield or Ernie (for even Ernie was beginning to
learn, despite the time he wasted in the cinema). But out of the shop, and as a member of a jury, he was as good as the next man and probably a good deal better. Dragged away from one's business, and then, him a grown man, set a problem a child could solve, and have to listen day after day to question and answer, quibble and evasion, when the truth was as plain as the nose on your face! That was bad enough in all conscience, and Ernie and the wife probably ruining the business between them (Ernie with his cheek, which no amount of teaching could quite subdue, and the wife with her happy-go-lucky carelessness); a pretty fine thing it was, and if a man couldn't enjoy a pipe of tobacco in peace, after sitting all those hours, and it might just as well have been in church for all the comfort there was … and besides, there was Dolly on his mind still. Dolly would be bedridden for a long spell. Maybe she'd never be really right again, for it had been touch and go. And that young fellow, George she called him, who was always hanging about and sending flowers and what not, but never came to the point. Nothing said about marriage— oh, dear, no! But I'll see as my girl gets her rights, Master George: you see if I don't.

Next to Mr Bayfield, and looking her primmest in case he should speak to her, sat Lucy Prynne, with Blanche Izeley's moral power to protect her from the threat of mild Mr Arthur Cheed, who sat on Blanche's right. Lucy had found the trial at first dreadful and afterwards rather muddling and boring. Seeing the prisoner, who had done all those wicked things, she quite forgot to wonder how Poor Mother was getting on without her. Three days away from Mother!—Lucy couldn't remember when it had happened before. It certainly made a nice change to be seeing a bit of life for once, though hardly decent to have to listen to such things in mixed company. Lucy was frightened of the prisoner at his first appearance, and frightened for him. The way they brought him up into the dock—from underground it seemed—gave her a sense of nightmare. But when she knew how he had treated his wife, and his horrible behaviour with that fast foreign woman, she couldn't help seeing that he had a look of Father about him: in fact it was Father and the so-called Aunt Lena all over again, and it might have been Mother herself who was
murdered, just fancy that! “I wonder if Lucy would like sixpence to buy sweeties with?” Aunt Lena had said. Lucy remembered it perfectly: it all came back. Netherclift-next-the-Sea, and the dead rabbit dripping blood, and Father's wicked genial spell-binding gaze that had made her feel like a rabbit herself, helpless, fascinated, limp with docility. How was Mother managing in her absence? And how was Someone Else managing? He asked me to call him Edward, she said to herself. That was an old story: he had since said many things more daring and more loving than that. But somehow it was to that moment—“I wish you would call me Edward!”—that her thoughts continually reverted. For that had been in a sense the beginning of everything, hadn't it? Except for that little talk at the Literary Society, and the wonderful night when he had called at the house for her, ever so late it was, and lent her his piece about Wordsworth to read. But indeed her commerce with Edward Seagrave had been, from first to last, a series of beginnings. One day they were the merest acquaintances; the next they were friends; and then, suddenly, heaven knew how, they were dear friends. From being no one in particular he had become the most marvellous of living creatures—and this, not, as it seemed to Lucy, by stages, but with a blinding flash as from heaven itself. What are we going to do now? I hope they'll be quick. He asked me to call him Edward.

Lucy had learned something about herself as well as much about Edward. For it seemed that there was, after all, 'something about her'. Is it true that I am lovely? she asked herself: but not quite seriously, for she was not so simple-minded as to treat a lover's confession of faith as though it were evidence of fact. Yet it was evidence of something, and if one man had found her fair, so could another; and it more than ever behoved her, as a young woman already pledged, to keep herself unspotted from the roving glances of men. Arthur Cheed had looked more than once in her direction; he had even, she fancied, allowed the ghost of a greeting to hover on his lips. But in fact he was unaware of this, and unaware of cherishing any particular interest in this Miss What's-er-name. He was lonely, and, after hours of listening, he wanted to exchange a word or two with someone, anyone. His neighbour,
Cyril Gaskin, who sat at the end of the table, six o'clock to the foreman's twelve o'clock (ex-Gunner Cheed remembered that much military technique), seemed to have such a conceit of himself as to repel advances before they were so much as offered; and Cheed had already been gently, oh so kindly and spiritually, snubbed by his other neighbour, Mrs Izeley. Small wonder, then, that his glance sometimes rested on Lucy. But he was thinking, if thinking at all, not of her but of his business, the precious garage, and of the young man Fred, left precariously in charge; and more particularly he was homesick for a sight of his Nellie and of Silas and Henry, the two cats.

Neither Cyril Gaskin nor Mrs Izeley would spare a glance for him; and that drab little creature two chairs away, whose name he had forgotten, seemed to think she was sitting in church yet surrounded by potential despoilers of her virtue. You've nothing to hope for from me, miss, said Mr Cheed, silently indulging a kind of humour of which only his wife knew him to be capable. Chilly you
may
be, my dear, but
I' m
not warming you. Mrs Izeley—for he remembered most of the names, having heard them called several times by the usher—Mrs Izeley sat like a Buddha, with eyes turned inward; and Mr Cyril Gaskin, still glowing with self-satisfaction in having begotten Master Cyril Gaskin (aged three weeks), had eyes for no one but the gentleman at the opposite end of the table, Charles Underhay to wit, whom he recognized as a weak, diffident fellow, quite unfit for the office of foreman. At Gaskin's right sat Sidney H. Nywood, wondering, underneath the discomfort of having to vote for the death of that poor lying devil in the dock, whether Sir Godfrey Bunce's little job up at The Grange, which promised to put a net profit of twenty-seven pounds into his pocket, would in his absence be snatched away from him by some other jobbing builder. Moreover, at this time of the year you never knew when a nice funeral mightn't fall into your mouth, as it were.

On Nywood's right, Roger Coates, still a youngish man (he told himself passionately) in spite of his forty-five years, was already beginning to plan what he should say, when he got home to Mother and the children, to impress them with a sense of his preternatural sagacity, his knowledge of human
nature, his quickness in getting at the truth of a complicated affair. Behind his conscious thoughts, to be scornfully repelled whenever it threatened to push its way forward, lurked the uneasy suspicion that Marjorie and Vincent, who were too smart by half, were not as grieved by his absence as they ought to be, and that even Mother herself was perhaps managing to suffer it cheerfully. That Little Supper in Soho had been an eye-opener to Mr Coates—or would have been had his eyes been capable of opening in the presence of facts uncongenial to his view of himself. For the behaviour of Vincent had been blarsy, as our French cousins say, and Mr Coates had been constrained to tell him as much, with self-protective jocularity. “Blarsy, my boy, that's you. I suppose you know what blarsy means, after the education I've given you?”

Of course there were things in this case that couldn't be mentioned in front of the children. Children knew a great deal too much nowadays, but there was no need to encourage them, and anyhow, if the shameful secret of their begetting couldn't ultimately be kept from them, he was at least resolved to say nothing that could possibly remind them of his own participation in 'that side of life'. But the wife was another matter. He could tell
her,
preferably in bed; and she, realizing what some men are like, and what running after women may lead to, would more clearly appreciate her luck in possessing such a husband as himself. She would be grateful —and why not?—for his twenty years of fidelity. There had been episodes; a bit of fun is a bit of fun; but since she didn't know about them it was as if they had never happened. It was sometimes dullish work being breadwinner for three hungry mouths besides one's own; but since Mr Coates had kept straight, and resisted temptation again and again (there was that little piece at Boulogne, for instance, when he'd only four-and-six left in his pocket), he was damned if he could see why this architect fellow, with his university education and all, should carry on as he did and get away with it. It wasn't right or decent. And anyhow, murder was murder: you couldn't get away from that.